1968: Year of Crisis

Abstract

On its way toward the affluent society, Western Europe was shocked by a series of student-led riots in 1968 that ultimately brought into question much of what Europe’s leaders had been trying to achieve since 1945. Before the riots began, some political scientists had suggested that the relative absence of serious political turmoil could only be explained by an “end of ideology” brought about by the inappropriateness of radical solutions in the modern welfare state. Both in Europe and in the United States during the 1950s students seemed to have little interest in politics. Although American students became more active in the early 1960s in response to the civil rights movement and then to the Vietnam War, Europe’s students remained quiet. Even if students had been dissatisfied, no one expected that their activities could harm the stable advanced European societies, let alone nearly bring down the government in France. Unrest was not confined to Western Europe. In Czechoslovakia, students and reformminded Communist party members overthrew an ossified bureaucratic party leadership and blew a breath of fresh air into the party before they themselves fell to Soviet forces in late 1968. Despite the obvious political differences between France and Czechoslovakia, both were perceived by the demonstrators as-authoritarian, bureaucratic states that were unresponsive to the needs of the citizenry.

To speak of repression in the case of an institution possessing no “physical” repressive power, such as a university, may seem paradoxical. This repression is part of the very functioning of the institution, its structure, which makes the student passive, because he interiorizes its norms and requirements.… This passivity kills all real desire and all creative spirit, the expressions of a nonalienated life.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, The Action-Image of Society by Alfred Willener

We have introduced the specter of liquidation of the absolute power of the bureaucratic caste, a caste introduced to the international scene by Stalinist socialism.… But bureaucracy, even if it has not the dimensions of a class, still shows its characteristics in anything that concerns the exercise of power. It takes preventive measures to defend itself and it will do so to the bitter end.… We do not endanger socialism: to the contrary. We endanger bureaucracy which has been slowly but surely burying socialism on a worldwide scale.

“The Luxury of Illusions,” Prague Reporter, July 31, 1968

The internal hierarchy is to be abolished. Every employee, no matter what his job, will receive the same pay…

French workers’ pamphlet, Assurance Générale de France, 1968